A Syrian-Kurdish refugee family stands outside tents provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at the Quru Gusik (Kawergosk) refugee camp, 20 kilometres east of Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, on October 10 (AFP photo)
“We came from Mazzeh in Damascus. We left it because of the situation there... where we could not go to school or go out of our houses” because of the “threat of being slaughtered or killed or kidnapped”, Shaqlawa says.
The Kawergosk camp was established in August as tens of thousands of refugees, most of them Syrian Kurds, flooded into northern Iraq, leaving aid agencies scrambling for critical infrastructure and supplies.
Fighting between jihadists and Syrian Kurdish forces helped drive the exodus, and there are now more than 185,000 Syrian refugees in the three-province Kurdistan region of Iraq, according to the United Nations.
